LGBTQ+ Rights

LGBTQ+ rights are human rights, and they are not negotiable. Every person deserves to live openly, free from fear, as a full and equal citizen. I believe that plainly, and I will act on it.

If elected, I will work to restore the federal protections that have been torn up and to write equality into law so it can no longer be revoked at the stroke of a pen. That starts with two bills. I will support the Equality Act (H.R. 15), which would put protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity into statute, covering employment, housing, public accommodations, credit, education, and federal programs.¹ I will support the Transgender Bill of Rights (H. Res. 1058), which affirms federal protection and equal treatment for transgender people.² These are the foundation, alongside the further bills described below, including the No Place for LGBTQ+ Hate Act and the 988 LGBTQ+ Youth Access Act, that would repeal the recent executive orders and restore the services that families have lost.³⁴

The State of Reality

Gender-affirming care is supported by the unanimous position of every major American medical organization. The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the American College of Physicians, the American Psychiatric Association, and others hold that this care is medically necessary and, for many patients, lifesaving.⁵ This care is all delivered under established clinical guidelines. The Endocrine Society draws on more than 260 studies for its Clinical Practice Guidelines, and over 2,000 studies have examined aspects of gender-affirming care since 1975.⁶ The AMA has committed specifically to opposing criminal and legal penalties against patients who seek the care, the families who support them, and the clinicians who provide it.⁶ In 2025, organizations representing more than 600,000 clinicians issued a joint statement rejecting political interference in treatment decisions.⁷

The Trevor Project’s 2025 national survey of more than 16,000 LGBTQ+ young people found that 36 percent seriously considered suicide in the past year, rising to 40 percent among transgender and nonbinary youth.⁸ Transgender and nonbinary youth unable to obtain hormones were nearly twice as likely to report a suicide attempt as those receiving them, 15 percent against 8 percent.⁹ Ninety percent reported that recent politics harmed their well-being, 49 percent of those aged 13 to 17 reported being bullied in the past year, and 45 percent of transgender and nonbinary youth said they or their family had considered leaving their state because of anti-LGBTQ+ politics and laws.⁸

The Legal Floor, Torn Up

In Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), the Supreme Court held that the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on sex discrimination in employment protects gay and transgender workers.¹⁰ Federal employees and the employees of federal contractors were protected from sexual-orientation and gender-identity discrimination under executive orders, some nearly thirty years old, covering roughly 14,000 transgender federal workers and over 100,000 LGBTQ+ employees of federal contractors.¹¹ Transgender people could obtain accurate passports and other federal identity documents, a practice in place for over three decades, with an “X” marker option added in 2022.¹² Federal health-nondiscrimination rules under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act extended to gender identity.¹³ Same-sex couples could marry nationwide under Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), with federal and state recognition reinforced by the Respect for Marriage Act of 2022. Federal surveys and public health surveillance systems counted LGBTQ+ people, which made discrimination and health disparities measurable. These protections had been assembled over decades. It was operative law and policy.

Executive Order 14168, signed January 20, 2025, directs the federal government to recognize only two sexes, defined “at conception,” to remove “gender ideology” from federal policy and communications, and to require that passports, visas, and Global Entry cards reflect sex assigned at birth.¹³ An order the following day revoked the non-discrimination protections covering federal contractors’ employees.¹¹ Executive Order 14183, on January 27, banned transgender people from military service.¹⁴ Executive Order 14187, on January 28, directed agencies to cut federal funding from medical institutions providing gender-affirming care to anyone under 19, describing that care as “mutilation.” On February 20, the Department of Health and Human Services rescinded guidance affirming that federal civil-rights law protects such care.¹³ Executive Order 14190, on January 29, directed agencies to strip “gender ideology” from K-12 schooling and tied federal education funding to compliance.¹⁵ Executive Order 14201, in February, moved to bar transgender girls from school sports under threat of withdrawn education funding, placing more than $860 million of Maine’s federal funding at risk.¹⁶

The State Department stopped issuing accurate passports. Within forty-eight hours it had withheld pending applications and returned passports marked with applicants’ birth sex.¹⁷ The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission moved to dismiss at least seven pending discrimination cases brought on behalf of transgender workers, deprioritized all new gender-identity complaints, and fired an administrative judge who objected.¹⁸¹⁹ The Bureau of Prisons moved to transfer transgender women to men’s facilities and to terminate their medical care.²⁰ The Department of Justice issued a memo in April 2025 directing prosecutors to investigate providers of gender-affirming care, then served more than twenty subpoenas on doctors and clinics. By 2026, hospitals had received grand-jury subpoenas indicating a criminal investigation.²¹²² In December 2025, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services proposed rules to strip federal funding from any hospital providing gender-affirming care to minors, a condition nearly every hospital in the country must meet to operate, and the same week the House of Representatives passed a bill to make providing that care a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison.²³²⁴ The threat alone was effective. By mid-2025 at least eight major hospital systems had halted gender-affirming care for young people, NYU Langone canceled appointments for existing patients, and the FBI solicited public tips against providers.²⁵²⁶

By early 2026, approximately 360 federal data collections had removed at least one measure of sexual orientation or gender identity, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scrubbed youth-health and HIV pages from its website.²⁷²⁸ Researchers warned that the removals would erode the ability to track the health of an estimated 14 million LGBT people in the United States.²⁷ The National Institutes of Health terminated roughly $783 million in research grants, including studies of transgender health and HIV, and the Supreme Court permitted the terminations to proceed.²⁹ On July 17, 2025, the federal government shut down the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline’s specialized service for LGBTQ youth, which had handled an estimated 1.5 million contacts since 2022.³⁰ The administration terminated $600 million in CDC HIV and STD prevention and public health surveillance grants, and withheld other appropriated HIV-prevention funds, a withholding that forced Los Angeles County alone to terminate contracts with 39 health providers, and restructured the international program credited with saving millions of lives.³¹³²³³

The judiciary lent a sledgehammer. In United States v. Skrmetti (June 18, 2025), the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, applying only rational-basis review and declining to recognize transgender people as a protected class.³⁴ The Court stayed injunctions against both the military ban and the passport policy, allowing each to take effect while litigation continues.³⁵³⁶ In June 2026, a federal appeals court barred the discharge of the named servicemember plaintiffs but left the ban otherwise in force, and the administration said it would appeal to the Supreme Court.³⁷ Where courts have ruled against the government, they have been direct: the judge who first enjoined the military ban found it “soaked with animus and dripping with pretext.”¹⁴ A federal court delivered a similar rebuke over book bans, in the schools Washington runs directly. Acting on the K-12 schooling order and two companion orders, the Department of Defense Education Activity, which teaches roughly 67,000 children of service members, quarantined nearly 600 books and lessons touching on race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities, and sexual health, and suspended part of its Advanced Placement Psychology course.¹⁵ In April 2025, twelve students from six military families sued. In October, a federal judge found the removals likely violated the First Amendment and ordered the materials restored at the plaintiffs’ schools, holding that the government may not deny students access to ideas merely because officials deem them divisive.¹⁵³⁸

Cuts to federal HIV-prevention funding fall heaviest on gay and bisexual men. The administration scaled back both domestic prevention grants³¹ and global programs, and in defending the global cuts the Secretary of State drew a distinction between treating people who already have HIV and funding prevention for groups that include gay and bisexual men.³⁹ Modeling of those cuts projects thousands of additional infections, the largest share of them among men who have sex with men.⁴⁰ In Mahmoud v. Taylor (June 2025), the Supreme Court held 6-3 that public schools must let parents remove their children from lessons that include LGBTQ+ characters, such as storybooks depicting same-sex couples.⁴¹ Marriage equality remains in force, but in 2025 at least nine states introduced bills or resolutions challenging it, and the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, made overturning Obergefell v. Hodges a priority.⁴²

Without a federal floor, human rights rest on state lines. Twenty-seven states have enacted bans on gender-affirming care for minors, and some states have begun restricting it for adults.³⁴⁶ Nineteen states circumscribe transgender people’s use of restrooms in government buildings, and more than a dozen define sex by birth anatomy in terms that exclude transgender and nonbinary people from civil-rights protections.⁴³ State legislatures introduced 575 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in 2025, of which 54 became law, and are advancing hundreds more in 2026 alongside more than one hundred such discriminatory bills at the federal level.⁴³⁴⁴⁴⁵ The books pulled from military-school shelves are the same titles at the center of book-removal campaigns in school districts across the country.³⁸ The result is a map in which the same person holds different rights, to medical care, to accurate documents, to equal treatment at work and in school, in different states.

To Restore and Build Anew

The Equality Act (H.R. 15), introduced by Rep. Mark Takano in 2025, would amend the Civil Rights Act and related statutes to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing, public accommodations, credit, education, and federal programs, placing protections in statute rather than in revocable executive orders.¹ The No Place for LGBTQ+ Hate Act (H.R. 3708), introduced by Rep. Becca Balint in 2025, would nullify the executive orders directly.³ The Transgender Bill of Rights (H. Res. 1058), introduced by Rep. Pramila Jayapal in 2026, supports federal protection and equal treatment of trans people.²

The 988 LGBTQ+ Youth Access Act (H.R. 5434), introduced by Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi in 2025, would restore the crisis service that was shut down.⁴ The Transgender Health Care Access Act (H.R. 2487), introduced by Rep. Becca Balint in 2025, would expand the supply of qualified providers, and the Pride in Mental Health Act of 2025 (H.R. 3757), introduced by Rep. Sharice Davids, would fund mental-health services for LGBTQ+ youth.⁴⁶⁴⁷ The LGBTQ+ Panic Defense Prohibition Act of 2025 (H.R. 4197), introduced by Rep. Chris Pappas, would bar the use of a victim’s identity to excuse violence.⁴⁸ The Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act of 2025 (H.R. 3243), introduced by Rep. Ted Lieu, and the Prohibition of Medicaid Funding for Conversion Therapy Act (H.R. 4244), introduced by Rep. Shri Thanedar in 2025, would treat conversion therapy as the dangerous fraud it is.⁴⁹⁵⁰ The John Lewis Every Child Deserves a Family Act (H.R. 6181), introduced by Rep. Danny K. Davis in 2025, would protect LGBTQ+ youth and prospective parents in the child-welfare system.⁵¹ The Global Respect Act (H.R. 6151), introduced by Reps. Sarah McBride and Brian Fitzpatrick in 2025, would sanction foreign officials who persecute LGBTQ+ people.⁵²

Congress should pass the Equality Act and the Transgender Bill of Rights to write these protections into law, repeal the executive orders that stripped them, and restore the funding and services families have lost, from the 988 youth crisis line to HIV prevention. If elected, I will vote for these bills, work to bring them to the floor, and use the oversight power of Congress to hold agencies accountable to the law.

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